One of the inspirations behind the trilogy that I’m working on, The End of Eternity, was this question: how would vampires exist in secret with smartphones being in nearly everyone’s hands? It is hard for anything to be secret these days since someone could easily film anything shocking, funny or controversial by whipping out their smartphones (be it an iPhone, Android…) and start filming.

Image by Waldemar Merger via Flickr via Creative Commons

So let’s say you are someone who is aware that vampires might be real. You think so because you work in a city morgue, you are a crime scene investigator, or you’ve had personal experience with someone dying under mysterious circumstances, or you’ve seen enough evidence online to convince you. So you start to look for vampires, trying to find proof that they exist so you can share it with the world, thus exposing these hidden creatures of the night.

You are suspicious of some people because other hunters have pointed them out as possible vampires on social media sites or blogs or vampire hunter forums. You’ve seen their photos and now you see them in real life. They do look unusually pale, like they are very ill. So you follow them and see where they are headed. You are very careful not to be noticed, since you’ve heard the legends that these creatures have very strong senses.

And then it happens. Your possible vampire has found its prey. It has attacked the victim on a quiet, dark street with no one around (and assuming, no surveillance video cameras…more about that later) – except you. As the vampire stabs its fangs into the victim’s neck, you creep closer and start filming. There you go – all the proof in the world that vampires do exist and are killing people to feed on for their nourishment.

Sounds logical to some degree. Hopefully you get away in time or else the vampire would get you!

I think such a scenario is possible, and it makes me wonder how would vampires maintain their secrecy during these times of great technological advances? They could try to “come out” of the coffin as they did on True Blood, but that won’t be as easy as the TV series or the Sookie Stackhouse books portrayed it, in my opinion.

That was a question I had as I started this series, and it comes to light, so to speak, more so as I write the second book “Between Light and Dark”. Technology is working against vampires, so how would they cope? Their once great powers – heightened senses, mind reading and clearing, moving at super-fast speed, etc. – are now up against human technology which just keeps evolving. For the first time, it seems, humans are no longer at vampires’ mercy. Now it seems, the vampires and the humans are on equal level.

I would think the older the vampire is – as in, centuries or even millennia old – the more they struggle to cope. They had spent so many years confident in their powers that it is hard to believe that their prey is starting to outdo them. They might even be a bit clueless about the latest technology since they live separately from humans. They might even be in denial.

So, I explore this issue in “Between Light and Dark” as Claire copes with her new existence as a vampire. The title says it all – will Claire side with the vampires trying to cope with modern technology, or will she side with the human world she so longs for?

These blog entries would be like a series. I’ll be writing up about modern technology and how it inspired me to write about vampires. What kind of world would it be for them? Would they survive? How would they cope?